Желанная красавица Rachel Blau

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Желанная красавица Rachel Blau
Even a hundred [light blue hanky, red line]
The quilt [paper scraps over quilt simulacrum]
Ornament and Crime [folkloric embroidered handkerchief border]
My maternal aunt (flowered printed border of handkerchief)
Is this a textbook case (collaged “woven” paper and one embroidered corner of a hanky)
For such failure (appliqued hanky, calendar)
contactTQ (at) tupelopress (dot) org
Karla Kelsey: This forum’s conversation around feminist poetics of the archives wouldn’t be the same without your intellectual and creative contributions to literature and thought. Your works of criticism have been pivotal, transforming the field of poetics, challenging received notions of whose writing matters, of what a reader might pay attention to, and of how such attention might be articulated. Reading The Pink Guitar, Writing Beyond the Ending, and Blue Studios not only taught me new things about writers I love but also were transformative experiences on an affective and intellectual level. I can still remember exact physical moments of engaging these books, of holding them in my hands. 
Rachel Blau DuPlessis: [interjecting]—Thank you; this comment means a lot to me.
Karla Kelsey: Your creative works equally challenge the boundaries of what can be written, of how one might write. For example Drafts , your series of 114 poems composed over two-and-a-half decades combine the epic and the ephemeral in an extensive, recursive long poem investigating the entwined processes of memory, history, and language. And your collage-poems Life in Handkerchiefs takes up these threads on a vivid, hand-worked scale, combining vintage handkerchiefs and text. 
There are so many questions to be asked about your relationship to archives—official archives like the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, where your papers are housed alongside H.D.’s, Mina Loy’s, Barbara Guest’s and other writers with whom you’ve been in conversation. Also unofficial archives, like your collection of hankies. 
The question I choose to ask here is about generativity and detail. In an interview with C.A. Conrad you call Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” a “generative document” and in your “Statement on Poetics” you discus the “social-sensuous generativity” of language and the “ungeneralized detail” that “changes everything because it speaks of the contingent, the intransigent, the odd, the potentially unaccounted, uncounted, unaccountable.” What is the relationship between the “generativity” of a document and its “detail,” and how do formal and/or informal archival settings play into this relationship? 
Rachel Blau DuPlessis: When I was thinking about how language and historical ideologies worked together –while figuring out my critical book about the early poetry of modernists, I found that the odd detail, the clashing word, the weird thing that rubbed me against the grain often was like a pinhole onto large-scale contradictions and social thinking. Those pinhole moments opened whole worlds of debates and ideologies current at the time (of the early modernist poets) and did so in in the condensed mode of poetic techniques. Things like the hanging “Klein” in a T.S. Eliot poem (when has a proper noun like that ever jumped both over a line break and stanza break?) or the visual-cultural compression of “Pig Cupid ...rooting” in a Mina Loy poem, or the words “besides” and “then” and “I am” in a Langston Hughes poem. If one stayed alert for those bumps and knots—a lot could be inferred and postulated and found. Word choice, semantic images, syntax and line break seemed to be a point of contact between poetic language and social world views in the poets without having the poems be polemical documents. I called this tactic of critical looking, or this lens for asking questions—“social philology.”(This all in Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry —and I actually do understand why Cambridge did NOT want it called “Entitled New” for the three new entitlements of modernism—New Woman, New Black [i.e. New Negro, in the contemporaneous word], New Jew—but it was a lovely title.) Responses inside the techniques of poetry to those formations are found all over in the poetry—not solely as content but deep in elements of form. So I wrote a critical book on that method of looking at poetry.
It’s as if the poems, seen in this lens, became their own archive of poetic detail that had large, social rationales, really, and were not just surface word play, or wit, or decoration. This was for me a very fruitful thought—this sense of crystallizations and condensations of gigantic nodules of thought within poetic representation. And, of course, representation (loosely art) is a kind of thinking via forms and tactics (using words and segmentivity in poems). 
As the end of a poem (precisely “Draft 85: Hard Copy”) I wrote
I think this is true, though it is hard to explain. Maybe the poem is a kind of prophecy of future feelings? or it stores feelings we did not know we had until we read them and then we are provoked by the poem to feel them? This is so much the opposite of the more banal “this poem expresses its feelings so beautifully” that I am almost giggling. Maybe the poem predicts feelings that you will have? Goodness—who knows, except I used the interesting word “archive” in the middle of all this speculation.
I actually think that art is some kind of archive as well as many other things. Maybe it is an archive of feelings to come? 
Some art is a definite archive—a still life of your nicest objects painted with all the glisten and shininess and textures imitated (at the apogee of a certain kind of still life in the 17th century usually by Dutch painters)—what a strange pleasure to see the possessed quality of those possessions.
Or Life in Handkerchiefs , a project of collage poems that I have done between 2017-2018. I describe this as loosely a progress through a female life, told by page by page with poems, prose poems, aphorisms and other texts collaged together with vintage handkerchiefs as the main artistic medium, along with fabric, lace and trimmings, artificial flower notions, vintage handkerchiefs, string, paper, including tickets, origami paper, and a photograph. This work is not really my life only, not even only my handkerchiefs for all the collage-poems, but something between my life as a girl-and-woman at a time and place and a general plausible woman’s life of a certain class and social zone with all those negotiations of gender expectations and resistance, doubled self-consciousness and self-questioning. It draws on handkerchiefs that I really owned—and even really used until they were practically rags—and then got salvaged into this art. And as the medium as well uses handkerchiefs picked up by me at yard sales (more salvage of the oddity, the particular, other people’s stuff) and saved until I thought of this project. The use of hankies as a collage medium seemed the perfect—if unknown beforehand—culmination of my random collection of these pretty and sometimes cliched objects. And there were handkerchiefs donated to this project by other women, friends, acquaintances and relatives, who must have been struck in some way at the interest of cleaning their bureau drawers of an oddity that they too had saved for a very long time. And as Karla Kelsey suggested too, it was a chance to pass on an affective object. In fact, some of the notes about the origins of at least two handkerchiefs in the lives of my friends’ relatives were included. And now in my notes to the project. Luckily for me, these friends decided to contribute to this art project–my metaphoric archive of womanhood—there was something wonderful about that generosity. An archive of femaleness, femininity (all that lace and flowers), of blood (various) and snot, and tears, of gestures of dress-up, of living loosely through World War II and the post-war wars, the knowledge of the Shoah, US casual racism; atomic bomb fears, how women get to be in charge of holidays like Christmas and St. Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving—all memorialized in—handkerchiefs? (And now in their accompanying poems. . .) This too is, as you say, a work based on an archiving sensibility as well as a respect for and a playing with crafts. I hope that one day the book—or perhaps box—of these collage poems hankies might be published together.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis: My relationships with archives are several, long-lived and in some cases quite intimate. Before I even begin responding to Karla Kelsey’s list of topics, however, I want to recall a recent news story and an apology of sorts. The National Archives of the United States manipulated its own presentation of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington to efface from the exhibited photograph some of the signs carried by the many participants that had anti-Trump slogans or sentiments. Probably many of the thoughts, fears and wariness expressed by the marchers (aside from their being First Amendment protected protest) have actually come true—that is, in the few years since, people’s wariness and suspicion of this apparently new, but known-quantity figure, have proven correct. How to rewrite history—first erase it. This is a scandal should not go without mention although an apology was offered (three years later)—after the event, presumably when the exhibit on two women’s marches went up: The march from 1913 (before suffrage was won) and from 2017, comparing the marches. They say they did not change the photograph itself because they do not “own” it, but they did change its presentation in the exhibit where most people would have seen it . Hence, I begin here with a now-archived press release from the National Archives.
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This is the end of a press release copied fully as my introduction. I do not know whether they replaced the image (as they said) or followed through with the review of their policies and procedures. I mean this incident or anecdote to hang here suggestively hovering over the following essay—with no full sense of resolution, mainly to show that archives are both a thing and a process. So too are collections.
Here are four activities that I have actually done in the archive mode. I have made a literary archive of my own work in poetry and essays/literary criticism as a real artifact for presentation. It is now housed at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. I am not going to talk about this, particularly. But I want to say that in constructing it, I was bound by certain categories that are standard and useful—real selection criteria forming an accepted institutional structure for literary archives, and one that makes things findable.
As for other archive work—first, I have collected, co-edited and published the personal-political memoirs of others, Second, I have helped to collect an archive of another person’s work and worked to get it published within a decade-long timeframe. And third, I have recently used my personal collection of material objects to make art from. I talk about that in the individual question that Karla Kelsey asked. These are three different activities all motivated by a sense that I did not want this writing, these thoughts and these objects to be lost. (The larger cosmic question of loss is unanswerable and may be undiscussable—except in and by art). These acts (described below) were motivated by specific desires to rescue and salvage materials from the possibility of loss (destruction, erasure, “undercounting,” discounting, and denial)—materials that I became convinced demanded to be saved. Some of these acts were really acts of collection. 
At the risk is sounding like as escapee from a pedantic attic and drawing on the fact that I live with a historian (with thanks to him), I’m going to define terms as best I can. An archive is quite different from a collection. But “archive” is also a term that has recently gathered a lot of aura around itself and is often used as a metaphor, and a powerful one for a mix of collecting, responding, and fear of losing the past or even the present. I will try to tell you when it’s a metaphor and when it’s not, because in one way, archive is really a specific technical term for a set of defined items selected on certain principles, catalogued and presented in a searchable way. And on another level, archive is a richly evocative metaphor for touching memory, having a heightened experience of a lost presence, and emotional charge from the vagaries of salvage, and feelings about presence and absence.
Archives are always, at root, a social and political act, a gathering of records deemed important because of the people involved, their activities, their social or literary powers. Seeing the records and activities and powers of “outsiders” is also crucial, so archives are always in a state of historical flux –shifting definitions or expanding whatever is considered important enough to be archivable. There are also hidden archives—as of Stasi, the East German secret police that, when the Wall “fell,” became findable. They were extensive archives kept to spy on many citizens. This too was an archive of power—and it was powerful when it was found, too. However, all archives have hidden elements—certain concealments occur because of the timeframe (75 years, 50 years. . .) set by the archive of origin, by the figure collected, or by other rules, of how many years may elapse before some archives are opened. Who, what and whether something is archived is a judgment call. And another crucial question is—by whom is that choice made? what are the interests of the makers of the archive? Even—what are they trying to present to the future.
Definitions of importance can and do change in processes that can themselves be shifted, jump-started, addressed critically, found to have flaws. The power to define is not always bad, or good, but it is always a historical and interpretable force. And it simply is one of the conditions for archives, let’s say government records. They are supposed to be systematic (which of course adds another potential layer of ideological practices—but there is an infinite regression of such statements.). Archives are also a set of social choices, a crossing point between one set of practices/ systems/rules and a mass of material, a result of seeing things a certain way (with certain assumptions that are themselves historically produced). Archives also need openness, and real readers—desiring interpretation– to be legible.
Archives are curated. This is always true and is part of their intention. This is not necessarily a bad thing or a conspiracy—just a fact. It’s a fact that must be dealt with. Suppose there is a government archive that collects only directives from a certain office. It’s worth having, but say this archive does not collect the official or even unofficial responses coming back to that office, stating how responsible parties responded to the directives—how were they carried out? were they possible to achieve? what was the blowback? The point is –fully to tell a story, a historian may need other archives (or possibly news reports, documents from law courts, items from material culture) to complete the dialogue, trialogue, and interpretation begun by one set of records. Archives always need to be completed (be completed by people) to assess all the dialogues and loose ends implicit in them. They are not so much answers as the generators of more questions.
By “legible,” I don’t mean just that the words can be read—that is “easy” enough to manage (not really, but we can pretend), although one might have to know specialized vocabularies, historical shifts in word meaning, or tonal shifts and euphemisms used in that (hypothetical government) office. Many literary archives even in our century and certainly before the advent of the typewriter depend on handwriting. One must know how to read various historical scripts so errors don’t occur from reader ignorance. Even in modernities, people may have bad handwriting. And what about statistic gathering and interpreting ? (I am not discussing this at all.) I mean that someone from the future has to be prepared (in assumptions and perceptions and capacity for inference) to comprehend what part of the past is recorded in this or that particular archive. Hence Archives need more Archives.
Who would think that in “our” country such a blatant act of erasure (of political slogans) was possible in the National Archives—even if it was not (they say) “permanent” except presumably in exhibition catalogues? And—no naivete here, please, who would have thought that it is not possible. It is certainly not best practices for Archives—but it is one possible politically influenced practice. One sees from these examples that forgetting and erasing can be as assiduously curated as remembering, that what some groups silently remember and pass on in quiet ways may be of great import under the radar, that the under-stories are vital and that the historical record is by definition incomplete because some stories are not heard, some archives are not legible, some ideas are automatically discredited if the voices that speak do not have “credibility” and that sometimes credibility simply means power. Or various powers.
Archives and collections can also be destroyed. By bombing in wars—happened a certain amount in the European wars of the 20 th century. Also people who revolt against an entrenched power by which they have been oppressed—in part by the keeping of records—have been known to burn government, debt collector, and manorial and plantation owner records. Or archives are destroyed by accidental fire—even now, in the (so-called) modern world. By poor storage tactics—too wet, too dry, wrong writing surface. By inadvertence. By accidents of one sort or another. By stupidity—parchment folios, thought useless, disappeared into a European country in the 20 th century where they were found being used to wrap frites (fried potatoes). Not all those folios were recovered. 
One needs to understand that what we have as a record (either Archive or Collection) is often a matter of sheer chance and that in certain cases no one knows, or can barely postulate, what is missing from the historical and literary –and human–record. I am haunted by the loss of the Library at Alexandria, of the full range of Sophocles’ plays, of Sappho’s poems, of the work of women poets who did not have a sister like Lavina Dickinson, of the poetry of a man whose relatives burned his manuscripts after his death for fear they might be found to be seditious, when the Russian army came calling. Think of the Denisovians, little bits of bone and a tooth in faraway caves and “suddenly” there is a whole branch of hominids whom we had not postulated. A little humility in the face of what we are missing is a good attitude to take while being grateful for what we d
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